Returning to my ideal clients, again…

Work was a little slow midsummer. It’s really picked up in the last 4-5 weeks – a number of new projects getting started, and enough work that I hired a second intern this week. But during the lull I seem to have strayed a bit from my ‘ideal client’ mentality.

I’m working on a few jobs where the client brought the design and just wanted some ‘design advice’ and coding. I won’t do that again anytime soon – I find it really frustrating to offer well-considered advice, only when asked for, and have it ignored, or worse, be told that I don’t know what I’m talking about. That’s not the kind of client I enjoy working with. I like partnering with people who value what I can bring to the table, not just my skills as a codemonkey. But here I am…

I took one of those jobs because it offered me a good opportunity to get some experience in a niche market where I’d never done any web development work. I think that was a good move and will be worth some frustration; the development parts are challenging and I love a challenge.

But the other one, it’s one of those situations where my instinct was on the fence. It didn’t say ‘run away’ clearly, which is what usually happens. It just said ‘meh.’ So I took the project mostly because I was in a slow work period. I’m being paid fairly; it’s just frustrating to see what could be a really beautiful website build around a finely-detailed, high-end product instead looking like something from the mid-to-late ’90’s. Sigh.

Teeth gritted, I carry on and learn another lesson about the importance of choosing the right people to work with for the right reasons.